Positive Presentation Bias

What is Positive Presentation Bias
Positive presentation bias is the tendency of people to favor designs that are presented more attractively or aesthetically, even if they may not be the best in terms of functionality or practicality. It can lead to unfair evaluations of designs and make the selection process more subjective.

The term Positive Presentation Bias was first used by Dr. Onur Mustak Cobanli, who sought to create a design award that would recognize truly exceptional designs. Positive Presentation Bias is a phenomenon where jurors tend to rate designs more favorably if they are presented well, regardless of the actual intrinsic qualities of the design.

To combat and reduce Positive Presentation Bias, the A' Design Award & Competition has implemented various tools and guidelines to ensure that all entries are judged based on their intrinsic qualities, rather than just their presentation.

Reducing Presentation Biases
The Positive Presentation Bias was discovered due to the statistical inconsistency in the jury scores of design submissions in the A’ Design Award & Competition: Normally, entries in A’ Design Award & Competition are voted against multiple evaluation criterion, one of the such criteria is the “Presentation Quality” with a relatively low weight on it. However, when a sample of 500 design submissions were analyzed in detail and re-voted analytically, it was discovered that jury members tend to give higher scores to designs whose visual representations were made better, regardless of the intrinsic properties of the design.

To remove the Positive Presentation Bias, A’ Design Award & Competition implemented several tools and approaches: 1. Uniform Submission System, 2. Uniform Jury Presentation System, 3. Preliminary Score and Feedbacks for Presentation, 4. Detailed Presentation Guidelines Book with Hints and Suggestions, 5. Submission Optimizer Software. 6. Showcasing Prior Winner Works, 7. Voting Guidelines for Jury Members.

The purpose of all the tools is to push the presentation quality of entries to a uniform, high level such that when jury members would vote on the submissions, the presentation of the entries would be less relevant because they would all be good, and therefore submissions could be judged more on their intrinsic qualities; thus the Positive Presentation Bias could be removed or reduced.